The NFL shtick that irks me more than a perpetual telethon when I’m trying to watch the UConn Lady Huskies on CPTV is coaches who cover their mouths, usually with a clipboard, so clever lip readers can’t decipher their play-calling strategy.

Maybe teams should focus on sideline activity that really can affect the outcome of a game — like an assistant coach tripping an opposing player with an outstretched knee. There go my chances of ever getting a ride in Stamford’s Jets bus.

It’s background time. Last month, the NFL fined the Jets $100,000 for Sal Alosi’s tripping of the Miami Dolphins’ Nolan Carroll on a punt return. The Jets then suspended Alosi, the team’s strength and conditioning coach. Maybe he can be the team’s designated lip-reader.

Seriously, folks. I’m not the first one who believes pro football lip-reading should take precedence over double-digit unemployment, taxes, the recession, terrorism, domestic violence, health care, global warming, the national debt and whether Frank Pepe’s will ever open a Stamford pizzeria.

The lip-reading issue pops up from time to time on Yahoo! Answers and other Web sites.

In a 2001 article in the New York Times, then-Giants head coach Jim Fassel said, ”There’s too much chaos during a game to pull something like that off on a continuing basis. Maybe a play or two gets stolen that way. Maybe. Because by the time an opposing coach reads lips, tells the coaches on the field what he thinks the other team is going to do, and that coach instructs the players, too much time has gone by.”

Another scenario, coaches say, involves television and makes lip-reading easier, according to the New York Times article. Networks often show extreme close-ups of coaches as they call plays. Opponents videotape the games and later read the lips of the few coaches who do not shield their mouths and try to detect a pattern they can look for in subsequent games.

“There have been rumors (lip-reading) has been happening,” said Fassel, who coaches the Las Vegas Locomotives in the United States Football League. “But if someone can pull it off, more power to them, because it seems extremely hard to do.”

Coach: “Well, Marv. I’d have to say it was our lip-reading crew. They just weren’t calling their interpretations in fast enough. And 70 percent of the time, they were wrong.”

The proper term now is speechreading, according to the Center for Hearing Loss Help in Stewartstown, Pa. Neil Bauman says on the center’s Web page, “English is not a particularly easy language to speechread. Some languages are much easier (and some are even harder). The best estimates are that 30 percent to 35 percent of English sounds can be speechread. In order for a sound to be easily speechread, it must be formed on the lips and/or in the front of the mouth.”

“Unfortunately for us, we form many English sounds in the middle of our mouths,” Bauman says. “Others come from the back of our mouths and even in our throats. These latter are absolutely impossible to speechread.”

“As a result, a perfect speechreader only would be able to speechread about one-third of what is said,” he says. “They guess at the rest, taking into consideration their understanding of the spoken language, the body language of the speaker and the subject under discussion. Some people are remarkably good at guessing but no one is perfect.”

I wonder if a perfect speechreader can understand anything UConn basketball coach Jim Calhoun is saying. I can’t understand him when I’m hearing one of his pre- or post-game interviews, let alone speechread it.

It would be easy to lip-read coach Bobby Knight.

He said, “What the @#$&(((&^$ are you bleepity bleep #$))(&^ guys doing out there? Just put the ^*)O(%$# ball in the #)(^($#@ hoop!”

I swear the following is true. A Long Island special education teacher, Ramone Ward, saw opportunity in the mouths of NFL coaches. He invented an anti-lip-reading device called the BoomGuard, which might augment his income but cut into sales of clipboards.

Ward has a patent pending for the BoomGuard, an attachment for the coach’s head set and microphone that covers the mouth. Ward told CNBC’s Sports Biz he has spoken to the NFL and wireless sponsor Motorola, but they didn’t seem interested in his invention.

Last week, I saw a camera angle during an NFL game that totally bypassed a coach’s microphone and his clipboard. That practice would render the BoomGuard and clipboard useless.

Then the NFL would have to start recruiting players, not from the usual “farm teams” like Notre Dame, Ohio State, Clemson and UCLA, but from Gallaudet University and its Division III football team. Most of the students at the Washington, D.C., college are deaf or hearing impaired, so they should know how to read those oral signals from the sidelines.

Yes, folks I’m glad that more than 900 words of useless drivel are coming to an end, too. But look on the bright side. I got through a whole blog without mentioning WTNH traffic reporter Teresa LaBarbera. Oooops!